Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators have succeeded in writing a readable, informative, and provocative book about what they call the “lived experience of ethnicity” in Cluj, Transylvania, where Hungarians, Romanians, Jews, and Germans once lived in a more or less tolerant multicultural society, but that in the course of the twentieth century became a region of majority and minority, Romanian and Hungarian. The book is valuable in a number of ways: first in its direct, readable, and clear style, which is remarkable given so many co-authors; second in its artful way of using technical terms and concepts from socio-linguistics to make sense of complex interpersonal interactions; and third in its organization, which makes the book useful for both introductory and advanced courses in history, sociology, and anthropology.

The first half of the book focuses in ever more closely, both geographically and temporally. It begins with a description of the history of Eastern and East Central Europe, moves in the next chapter to a description of Transylvania, then focuses in the next two chapters on the history of Cluj up to the execution of the Ceauşescus, and then on life in Cluj after the dictator's death. In part 2, after two chapters that introduce “Portraits” and “Preoccupations” (chapter titles) of the individuals whose statements provide the book's raw material, the second half moves thematically, addressing first analytic terms that we need to understand in order to make sense of everyday experiences (“Categories,” “Languages”), next the key social forms that help shape ethnicity (“Institutions”), and finally three social processes important for an understanding of how ethnicity works on the ground in Cluj, “Mixings,” “Migrations,” and “Politics.” The chapters in part 1 are useful summaries of both theory and history. The first chapter in particular on “The National Question in East Central Europe” draws upon Brubaker's earlier work to provide an invaluable, concise introduction to the problem of the nation and the national in this part of Europe. The chapters of part 2 are useful not only for specialists in European ethnicity, but also as examples of a kind of analysis that focuses “on the ground.” By examining over a hundred interviews conducted over more than ten years, Brubaker and his colleagues discover that ethnicity in Cluj is not, as some might assume, a ubiquitous problem simmering on the front burner of everyday life, ready to break into violent conflict, but something that appears and disappears in the course of the flow of life situations, circumstances, and needs.

A work this rich deserves an extensive discussion, but let me raise two points that might provide points of departure. First, the book concludes that in the lives of their informants there is substantial distance between “politics” and “everyday life”; their informants, both Hungarian and Romanian, share a distaste for politics and politicians. One thing we are left wondering, however, is about the presence of the political in their lives. Although their informants express some degree of frustration about the difficulties in their lives and in their society, we do not get any sense of the structures of power that determine their options. This is one risk in a study so focused on the elucidation of day-to-day interactions.

My second observation is simply that despite the close focus on day-to-day interactions, the book does not provide the reader with a sense of the role ethnicity plays in the creation of persons in everyday life. I should quickly acknowledge that I understand their focus on ethnicity provided the determining criteria about what material to include in their analyses and what to ignore. I also believe this is a function of their conception of fieldwork and ethnographic method being put to sociological purposes. The information gleaned from group interviews and surveys that is then coded and sorted by software produces the image of the everyday that is built in and from speech. As the authors would I am sure be the first to agree, however, ethnicity exists also in relationship to places and objects, sounds, colors, gestures, etc., states and dispositions that require a different attitude to ethnography for their evocation. These facets of the subjective experience of ethnicity are absent from the book; and although this would have been a fascinating addition, the volume still stands on its own as an invaluable addition to our knowledge of ethnicity in Europe.